A top US lawmaker is calling for the better use of the Pentagon’s innovative technology production qualities to scale up responses to the coronavirus, Covid-19.
“Nobody is better in mass production in a crisis than the Department of Defense [DoD],” Adam Smith, chairman the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), told reporters on 7 March.
Oshkosh’s 6×6 variant of its Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected All-Terrain Variant (M-ATV). The US House Armed Services Committee chairman wants the Pentagon’s innovative technology production qualities to be used to scale up responses to Covid-19. (Oshkosh Defense)
Smith believes the Pentagon can play a bigger role in helping the US get the virus under control, where it can manage the risk and begin to get people, slowly at first, back to work and back to school. That could be by figuring out how to mass-produce cotton swabs, as he said US testing for Covid-19 declined from the week of 30 March because the country is running out of swabs.
“The way to look at the whole challenge ... is the way that DoD looks at most of its job: it is a manner of managing risk,” Smith said. “It is unlikely that, in the near term, we are going to get zero risk on Covid-19, but what is a manageable risk to allow certain people to do certain things?”
Smith said the Pentagon in the last 100 years has faced conflicts where it suddenly needed something that it did not know it would need. This included developing mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) ground vehicles in the late 2000s in response to a growing threat from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq.
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